og disparate it mgmt tool impact report

The Impact of Disparate Tools

on the State of IT Service

Management in Mid-tier

Organizations

An Ogren Group Special Report

March 2009

Copyright 2009, Ogren Group

More than 40% of mid-tier businesses

employ more than 6 tools to manage

their networks.

Introduction

IT service management aligns information technology processes, controls, and priorities to

meet business demands while delivering greater cost savings, reducing risks of service

disruptions, and supporting business expansion. The concept of IT being run as a service, as

opposed to functional network, systems and application silos, has gained significant adoption in

many organizations. Leading IT standards such as ITIL, ISO and COBIT all embrace the concept

of IT service management to effectively integrate IT with the business. CIO’s, IT executives, and

data center directors within mid-tier organizations are seeking to take advantage of IT service

management to improve service responsiveness and drive down operational costs.

Unfortunately, real progress towards IT service management and its respective benefits often

eludes mid-tier IT organizations. The company’s infrastructure has grown, but the IT

organization has very limited means for integrated oversight or service-oriented control to

manage the growth in complexity. The common

approach is to develop departmental teams

specializing in network, systems, and

applications management, but without

complete visibility of the business process to

optimize support of the organization. These organizations have solidified the functional silos by

amassing tools to assist in managing the infrastructure from a component rather than a service

perspective resulting in inefficiencies, increased license and operational costs, and business

risks.

The Ogren Group obtained feedback from 179 North American data center directors and IT

professionals within the mid-tier market regarding their level of confidence with the tools they

have in place to support IT service management. Only 17% of those surveyed felt very confident

in the tools they use to monitor and optimize network and application availability, performance,

compliance, and security, as shown in Exhibit 1. Mid-tier IT organizations, defined as having

between 250 and 5000 employees, are not confident they have adequate systems and network

management tools to address the reliability requirements, performance improvements and

cost-saving expectations of the business. For many, the situation is worsening as IT budgets

and headcounts are being trimmed while corporate systems, applications, access, security and

network complexity is increasing.


Exhibit 1 Do you feel that you or your organization has adequate tools in place to monitor and optimize

network/application availability, performance, compliance, and security?

This presents an underlying crisis as mid-tier organizations are facing challenging service

response expectations with management tools they have little confidence in and with flat or

shrinking budget allocations. While these organizations are adopting cost-saving technologies

such as virtualization in the data center, distributed and mobile access, outsourced services and

cloud-oriented application services, they are constrained by the lack of integrated

infrastructure and service management capacity. Mid-tier businesses require tools that focus

on correlating broad operational data, applying analytics, automating critical IT management

functions, and facilitating service level monitoring. A holistic service management approach

allows IT to move forward with new technologies and business initiatives while reducing

operations expenses, lowering risks and improving service performance.

More integrated management capability requires an optimized means to capture, correlate and

manage operational data, while at the same time consolidate core IT management functions

and streamline service definition. The result would allow IT to more effectively maintain real-

time and historic visibility of infrastructure performance, control over the infrastructure’s

technical elements, and deliver against service levels to better serve the business. A single

operational “pane of glass” solution, specifically architected for the requirements of mid-tier

organizations, permits IT to confidently automate valued functions including:

Diagnose problems and security issues: IT delivers services with predictable response,

availability, security, and user experience. Relying upon multiple system and network

management tools makes it difficult to analyze and correct disruptions in network,

system, application, or security performance in a timely manner. This is especially the

Not very confident,

19.50%

Somewhat confident,

62.0%

Very confident,

17.20%


case when performing root-cause analysis on network, system and storage

virtualization technologies.

Control infrastructure configurations ensure reliability, consistency, and performance:

the greatest causes of instability in the network, application performance, and security

are configuration settings that are outdated, inadvertently changed, not following

industry best practices, or are inconsistent across network devices and systems. A

common configuration validation solution allows IT to more confidently control network

resources and assure optimal business performance. Organizations need to both

validate a change, as well as readily see the affect of a change.

Streamline compliance and governance processes: audit requirements to demonstrate

compliance with standards and regulations such as COBIT, GLBA, HIPAA, and PCI often

require merging controls and consolidating reports from multiple sources - an

expensive and time consuming effort. A broader and more automated approach reduces

audit costs and enables IT resources to focus on more directly beneficial business

activities.

Monitor operational service levels: baseline and correlate their infrastructure

components with associated applications in order to establish and monitor an IT service.

Automating this process across both physical and virtual environments dramatically

enables IT to prioritize incident response, reduce downtime business impact, and

measure IT service improvement.

This Ogren Group Special Report, commissioned by AccelOps, illustrates the challenges faced

by mid-tier IT organizations and the problems with employing disparate IT management

solutions. The report also assesses a more integrated approach that expedites mid-tier

organizations’ ability to achieve and improve IT service management.


82% of those surveyed are not very

confident that they have adequate tools

in place for IT service management.

The problems with current IT management tool portfolios

Mid-tier companies are investing in managing components of the technical infrastructure – the

network, systems, applications, users, as well as access, changes and trends. Unfortunately,

the tools employed do not provide the situational awareness, baseline or oversight needed to

enhance service reliability, performance and security for the business.

Approximately 82 percent of respondents to the AccelOps survey issued by the Ogren Group,

reported that they are not very confident that they have adequate tools in place to monitor and

optimize network and application availability,

performance, compliance, and security. This

is a critical shortcoming in IT’s arsenal to

deliver timely and cost-effective services to

the business. Mid-tier companies do not have

extensive budgets and resources, yet the expectations for delivering IT services to the company

are perhaps more important to the success of the business than ever before.

According to Ogren Group research, none of the network and systems management functions

fared well in the surveys. A score of 3.0 is considered average on a scale from 1 to 5, and every

IT service rated only about average. Not a single IT service scored close to a high degree of

satisfaction, as shown in Exhibit 2. In fact, respondents consistently rated network monitoring,

security information management, and application performance/diagnostics as the least

satisfactory among the most critical services provided by IT. These traditionally functional areas

within IT are still managed with relatively independent tools, inhibiting the converged visibility

and control necessary for IT service management.

Exhibit 2 What is the degree of satisfaction with the current category of tools your organization employs to monitor

and maintain availability, performance, compliance and/or security?

1 2 3 4 5

Security information management

Network monitoring

Application performance

Network asset management

IT service desk

Compliance monitoring

Directory services monitoring

3.3

3.4

3.2

3.4

3.5

3.6

3.5


According to Ogren Group research, over forty percent of mid-tier survey respondents reported

that they are using more than 5 tools to manage the technical infrastructure, as shown in

Exhibit 3. This reflects the binding between management tools and the definition of IT functional

silos. An IT service management approach breaks these bindings while converging visibility and

control of the functional silos to focus on service to the business. IT teams in mid-tier

organizations are not satisfied that they presently have adequate network, system, application,

security and compliance management tools to efficiently satisfy business requirements.

.

Exhibit 3 Approximately how many tools does your company utilize to monitor, report and maintain availability,

performance, compliance and/or security?

The use of many functional management tools across the IT organization presents situations

where operational blind-spots and waste permeate, IT services cannot be efficiently sustained,

and hidden costs and business risk can grow. Key operational responsibilities for IT service

management that business constituents expect include:

Monitor network and application performance: the organization relies on the predictable

performance of networked applications where disruptions in application performance

are instantly noticed by end-users. IT needs to have the tools to discover bottlenecks,

anomalies and resource irregularities before end-users are affected.

Maintain and improve service levels: identify and monitor components that support

critical business services. IT should manage to service levels for operational response,

infrastructure performance, cost controls, and enabling new business opportunities.

1-5 tools, 59.20%

6-10 tools, 32.90%

11-20 tools, 4.80%

Too many tools, 1.70%


Assure appropriate infrastructure configurations: prevent drift in approved configuration

settings, maintain a consistent enterprise-wide configuration management policy, and

validate changes that are all essential in preventing performance degradation and

service disruptions.

Provide visibility into the IT infrastructure: reduce service downtime, degradation in

system performance, security incidents, and service desk call volume by operating with

increased visibility of the entire infrastructure. Heightened visibility into the IT

infrastructure also allows IT to effectively demonstrate process improvements in

reports to executives, lines of business, and team members.

Enhance operational security: improve the means to identify, analyze, and resolve

security incidents that adversely affect business performance. IT needs to efficiently

filter operational noise, escalate pertinent security events, monitor compensating

controls, and coordinate active responses.

Enable user activity control: acceptable use policies are especially important in

monitoring the activity of privileged users, administrators, outsourced consultants and

service accounts. IT controls for enforcing acceptable use policies reduce the risk of

abusive, inappropriate, unauthorized or accidental use of corporate resources.

Report on governance and compliance processes: organizations of all sizes need to

establish and monitor controls that align to standards and regulations, especially as

defined by ITIL, ISO, and COBIT. Reporting against compliance posture for auditors and

customers should be a comprehensive automated process to lower costs.


AccelOps All-in-One steps up IT service management

AccelOps All-in-One is a data center and IT service management solution for mid-tier organizations that reduces the burden of juggling multiple management tools, while at the same time breaks conventional IT management silos that hinder IT service reliability and efficiency. AccelOps offers an integrated solution that correlates diverse operational data and delivers out-of-the-box analytics making it easier for IT to perform critical functions such as diagnosing application performance, improving response times from the IT service desk, assessing systems assets, expediting root-cause analysis, baselining and mapping the infrastructure, generating operational reports, fortifying governance and facilitating IT service management. AccelOps All-in-One dovetails in the existing IT environment, rapidly improving the ability to monitor, control, and manage the infrastructure from a service perspective including rich functionality such as:

Infrastructure discovery, baselining and mapping

Change and configuration management (CMDB)

Network behavior and virtualization analysis

Availability and performance management

Event log and security information management (SIM)

Identity access and directory service monitoring

Service definition and business service management (BSM)

Extensible dashboards, reports, and rules aligned to best practices

Exhibit 4 AccelOps Data Center and IT Service Management


AccelOps offers an automated data center and IT service management approach that enables

organizations to migrate from a component to a service-based management model, including

the critical functions highlighted in Exhibit 4. AccelOps All-in-One has focused its design

principles on those solution attributes that bring the most value to mid-tier IT:

Reduces operating expenses: AccelOps IT service management solution saves time and

energy for IT administration by centralizing operational data. IT easily finds the

information it needs in one intuitive IT service management tool, effectively updates the

network visibility and control situational analysis, and automatically performs repetitive

monitoring and reporting tasks.

Easily integrates into existing environments: The All-in-One system captures and

manages configuration data, network flow data, as well as diverse application and user

transaction data (including primary and secondary logins). The solution automatically

understands the data coming from reporting sources and how to process and manage

that data. AccelOps is deployed with support for the major system, network and

application products, and the solution can be customized to support new data sources

without requiring an entire AccelOps update.

Improves response times: AccelOps’ user interface presents IT with an integrated view

of the infrastructure, the most pertinent operational status, and the ability to drill-down

to finer details. Administrators can readily drill down beneath service, business, and

operational instrumentation to the details of who, what, when, where, and how for root

cause analysis. The system ships with out-of-the-box reports, heuristics, rules, metrics,

dashboards and reports that are easily extensible. The visibility and control provided by

a common IT services management tool allow IT to rapidly respond to incidents and

requests.

Enables CMDB and IT service management: The AccelOps system discovers and

baselines the infrastructure details from sources such as network flows, network

devices, security, systems, applications, and directory services. The configurations and

subsequent changes are all tracked within a complete change management database

(CMDB). Since the system learns infrastructure to application relationships, the user is

presented with an automated means to define a service. The user can easily set service

levels on top of the monitored component attributes that are inherited by the defined

service. The result jumpstarts IT service management, monitoring and measurement.

The AccelOps software product comes in two flavors – as a virtual appliance or as a Software as

a Service (SaaS) offering. This allows for immediate use and appliance-like integration, as well

as deployment flexibility and ability to scale throughout the mid-tier organization. The AccelOps

All-in-One solution for IT service management consolidates management tools and optimizes

the respective use of operational data. Companies may realize additional cost savings in

bandwidth, servers, power and storage by reducing duplication of operational data.


Conclusions

The plethora of IT management tools inhibits the ability of IT to move forward with IT service

management initiatives. Mid-tier businesses have been employing separate non-integrated

management tools for each function IT, including fault diagnosis, network and application

performance, asset management, security, and operational reporting. The perceived

satisfaction of these tools is illustrated in Exhibit 5, where respondents rated each of these

critical capabilities of an active IT team as average or worse. This inefficiency often results in

higher operating expenses, extended response times, on-going administrator training, and

costly service degradation and outages.

Exhibit 5 Based on the tools currently utilized, rate on a scale of 1 (least) to 5 (best) how easy and quickly your

organization can satisfy these IT or business unit requests?

AccelOps brings to market a uniquely integrated IT service management solution that replaces

a wide variety of individual management tools, harnesses the value from operational data,

allows IT to be more efficient, enhances service reliability, and makes service management for

the mid-tier market tangible and possible. IT has greater flexibility to manage IT services from a

strategic perspective rather than a tactical functional perspective defined by traditional tools

and processes. By delivering the solution in a virtual appliance or Software as a Service

offering, AccelOps provides a choice of deployment methods that best integrate with the IT

environment. A subscription pricing model lowers initial costs and enables the organization to

adjust capacity as needed.

Effective management of the technical infrastructure is a critical core competency for IT. The

Ogren Group recommends that organizations re-examine their IT management processes and

tool sets and explore new approaches that make it significantly easier and less expensive to

operate their business with IT service management.

1

2

3

4

5

Monitor and correlate a device,

system or application fault

Modify IT component

availability to improve business

function

Produce details and reports satisfying

operations requirements

3.0 3.1 2.8


The Ogren Group Special Report has been commissioned by AccelOps and is published for the sole use of Ogren Group clients. It

may not be duplicated, reproduced, or transmitted in whole or in part without the express permission of the Ogren Group, 92

Robert Road, Stow, MA 01775. For more information, contact the Ogren Group: [email protected]. All rights reserved. All

opinions and estimate herein constitute our judgment as of this date and are subject to change without notice.

mailto:[email protected]

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